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Mr. Peter E. Holmes
Director, Office for Civil Rights
Department of Health, Education
and Welfare
330 Independence Avenue, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20201
Dear Mr. Holmes:
Appendix II
SAMPLE FORMS OSICR 101 AND OSICR 101
OF THE FALL 1974 ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOL
CIVIL RIGHTS SURVEY AND LETTER TO OCR DIRECTOR
RECOMMENDING CHANGES IN FORMS
April 12, 1974
We have received no formal acknowledgment of
our letter to you of March 22, 1974, in which we
suggested refinements of the questions that appear
in the reporting forms for the Office for Civil Rights
Annual Elementary and Secondary School Civil
Rights Survey. However, a member of our staff has
contacted Ms. Rosa Wiener of your Elementary and
Secondary Education Divisi6n and has learned that,
except for several definitional changes regarding expulsions
and suspensions, it is likely that none of our
other suggested refinements will be incorporated in
the revised civil rights survey forms for Fall 1974.
We are therefore asking that you reconsider our
suggestions which we believe are essential if the data
collected by the Office for Civil Rights is to be useful.
We have attached again to this letter our specific
recommended changes in the instructions and forms
for the school system summary report (Form OSICR
101) and the individual school campus report (Form
OS/CR 102) and have incorporated, where appropriate,
what we understand to be the modifications
recently made by your staff. As you will recall, our
revisions in the area of special education are designed
to clarify the distinctions among handicapped
students participating in various special education
programs. With regard to suspensions, we propose
that the number of times single persons are suspended
and the durations of the suspensions be in-
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c1uded in the annual civil rights survey. We have
also recommended that the question in the survey
regarding school-age children not in school be made
more meaningful. We would now like to discuss in
more detail than previously the reasoning behind
each of our recommendations.
Special Education
Our study of children out of school and children
effectively excluded from appropriate educational
programs has greatly increased our sensitivity to the
numerous special education problems and programs
available to children with various handicaps. It is
important that the information collected by the Office
for Civil Rights accurately account for the students
enrolled in various special education programs.
We share the views of your staff that minority students
who have been labeled as "socially maladjusted,"
"underachievers" and "slow learners," are
likely to be overrepresented in special education programs,
but we do not think the Office for Civil Rights
should use these labels to describe children enrolled
in special education programs. These ambiguous
labels are too often used to misclassify students,
especially those who have suffered from educational
deprivation or whose cultural backgrounds may be
different from the majority population. Our experience
has shown that children who have been so misclassified
are often placed in special education programs
for the emotionally disturbed. Thus we are
suggesting that, instead of asking for information
about pupils classified as socil\lly maladjusted, underachievers
and slow learners (OSICR Form 102,
Item lX. A.3), information be requested about pupils
enrolled in special education programs for the
emotionally disturbed (Attachment B, pp. B-1, B-3).
Our suggested refinements regarding Item IX. B.
(Form OSICR 102) arise from our concern that to